autumn when vegetation has entirely ceased; there is now a faint
shadow of life, gradually brightening into the warm reality. Some
tracts in a happy exposure,--as, for instance, yonder southwestern
slope of an orchard, in front of that old red farm-house beyond the
river,--such patches of land already wear a beautiful and tender
green, to which no future luxuriance can add a charm. It looks
unreal; a prophecy, a hope, a transitory effect of sonic peculiar
light, which will vanish with the slightest motion of the eye. But
beauty is never a delusion; not these verdant tracts, but the dark
and barren landscape all around them, is a shadow and a dream. Each
moment wins seine portion of the earth from death to life; a sudden
gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope of a bank which an
instant ago was brown and bare. You look again, and behold an
apparition of green grass!

The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already
appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one
magic touch they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and
that the wind which now sighs through their naked branches might
make sudden music amid innumerable leaves. The mossgrown willow-
tree which for forty years past has overshadowed these western
windows will be among the first to put on its green attire. There
are some objections to the willow; it is not a dry and cleanly tree,
and impresses the beholder with an association of sliminess. No
trees, I think, are perfectly agreeable as companions unless they
have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a firm and hard texture of trunk
and branches. But the willow is almost the earliest to gladden us
with the promise and reality of beauty in its graceful and delicate
foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow yet scarcely withered
leaves upon the ground. All through the winter, too, its yellow